Writer/ Journalist/ Time Traveller

Just wanted to share this lovely, insightful mini review of The Sibius Knot, my second novel, in a piece Devapriya Roy did for Scroll on 5 Contemporary Books that "put different minds in the centre". Do read the full piece here

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The Sibius Knot, Amrita Tripathi

It is only much later, after he dies, that I realise I have to tell the world what we were getting up to. Fighting for all your souls, and you didn’t even realise. I hit college when Mario takes his battle to the Darkness itself. Getting inside the drug haze, fighting inside out – sure, you could say that’s what killed him, an overdose, that’s what doctors say, but I know different.

I looked into its eyes, dammit. Death killed him. Just like that.

Amy, Tara and Mario are children of the nineties, growing up across cities and continents, and together with their bravely scrappy bunch of friends – Little Bastard, Seema, Preetha, Dan, Sid, Dhruv and Ruchika – they face HH, the mysterious, malevolent and all-powerful foe. Who is HH? What is it that governs his/her choice of “others”? And what does the sibius knot, “a one-way route to death and the devil, distorted inheritor of the Mobius Strip”, have to do with all this?

This book is the ultimate outlier: it falls squarely in the realm of experimental fiction, yet you’ll find yourself sitting up at night, turning the pages obsessively, as though it is a thriller. On second thoughts, it is a bit of a thriller too.

In the Acknowledgements, Tripathi writes:

This is clearly a work of fiction, but there are some fundamental truths here. One in four people will have a mental health problem in their lifetime – I daresay four out of four people will need some sort of help at some point. Not all of them will be able to get it.

If you’re one of the tribe trying to survive the darkness, you know it’s pretty much bashing on, day by day…

Impossible to categorise – or ignore – The Sibius Knot is a brave book that demands to be read, re-read and remembered.

It's been one intense and busy summer -- hope you've all managed to keep your cool? (Why for the love of all the gods is it still so hot in Delhi mid-September!)

My updates, such as they are:

-- As usual, madum is jumping out of her comfort zone and wondering where she lands. I've taken on a new role over at Twitter India. You'll find a little (not a whole lot!) more on my LinkedIn and Twitter account (@amritat). Feel free to connect and share your thoughts, comments, feedback and what-not

-- The passion project that is The Health Collective continues with some fab contributors, so do check it out!

-- The writing continues on a less grand scale, sadly. I have a draft manuscript I've sort of decided to overhaul entirely, and I am will be re-working (that's the plan at any rate)
While I'm doing that, do feel free to check out my last two novels The Sibius Knot and Broken News, if you like! Buy! Read! Share! (More on that on the books page)

-- I finally wrote about my father. It's been weird and difficult and heart-wrenching to think about him in the past tense, and I will say, memories pop up at the oddest times.
But I reckon you have to keep trying to make your peace with, if not make sense of, it (nothing about life and death *really makes sense). Many more of you know what I'm trying to say in this garbled fashion. The piece that Scroll published encapsulates some of that journey, through ... books, what else?!

Reading with my father, from my childhood till the time the end was near for him

She, a writer, prefers fiction. He, a diplomat, liked nonfiction. Together, they created a museum of reading memories.

It’s been five months since my father passed away. Time softens the blow, they say, but it’s still unimaginable that there are conversations we’re not going to have anymore, say about who’s a total fraud, how things are going to hell in a hand-basket, where the world is headed. Out of these, the most frequent question was: “What are you reading?” Followed often enough by a “Challenge yourself”!

We’re a family of readers and I wonder if this inherent judgement of other people based on whether they read in the first place, and what they read, is an inherited trait.

I’ve always had more of an appetite for fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and some literary fiction, of course, and I have to make a conscious effort to read non-fiction. My father was the opposite, barely reading fiction as an adult. We argued about that, of course, once I found my voice, and judged each other from our sides of the boxing ring.

When he did read 15-odd pages of my novel The Sibius Knot the year before last it was a major deal. It unmoored him though, so he stopped. (Perhaps this novelist took more inspiration from real-life events than she let on.)

Last year, mid-treatment cycle he said he would read me when I reached 30,000 copies in sales... You’ll have to hang in there and keep fighting for years, I laughed.

Alas.

Over the years

Our journey through books had so many ups and downs, but it’s like a trail, something out of Hansel and Gretel.

The first book I gave my father was back in college, City of Djinns, which he enjoyed. I later got him a Jared Diamond and then much later, I lent him a review copy of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal which I had been sent. He read it, was moved by it, and essentially gave me a “What the hell was that”, sort of reaction which of course made me read the book and then…understand what he meant. It’s an insanely powerful account of the need to come to terms with our mortality, with how we want to die.

We do not want to think about how our loved ones might die. Like my dad, I refused to read The Emperor of Maladies, once I knew his diagnosis. Something about the finality with which we were told “Stage IV cancer”. He said that I could read it and give him the gist of it, but neither of us had the heart for it, once it got so personal.

But it is personal. One line that stayed with me from Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, which I repeated and insisted on repeating to dad, was the poignant moment where he says:

“Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”

Kalanithi’s book was the last book I gave Dad to read. (He later gave it to his oncologist, who was touched, I daresay, but also implored my father to read lighter things.)

These days, I find I think more about kindness, ethical ways to behave and other things that many of us usually don't have the time or energy for. Because, as so many people have chronicled, busy busy busy-ness is the (now not so-) new trend. But where do we get off saying we're too busy to be decent, if not kind outright? And why is decency seen as an invitation to walk all over someone? Nice is not equal to doormat, folks!

And what of the opposite? It's something I've struggled with in different avatars -- if you're going through something, does it give you license to play the asshole card? Sometimes, sure, but... as a default?

Just like we don't expect people to bring their private lives into the workplace, I suppose we hope that private grief or trauma doesn't seep into everything. But it doesn't work like that. When you're gutted, you lash out sometimes, you implode at others. Little things can send you over the edge.

I've been irrational with anger at incompetence or callousness. I've been impatient and cursory with attention and affection, too busy to call, too busy to care, too exhausted to think sometimes. A recent train trip in a foreign land saw me blinking through tears as much as enjoying the view, but don't quote me on that. I've watched as people I care about lash out at each other, at strangers, while shouldering enormous burdens none of us should have to bear. I've lashed out, horridly, horribly, and barely recognised myself. That ugly anger, where did it come from? Why does destructive energy take over so completely? And feel like such a release...until it drains you altogether?

Sometimes self-awareness is a tough gig, kids. You don't always like what you see in the mirror. But there's *always scope for improvement.
I'm somewhere on that journey still. I mean, trying to make sense of things, I've also acknowledged (sort of) that I'm taking a time-out.

I've sighed with relief that a potentially devastating emotional situation has hit a stalemate, though that is a huge departure from who I am, or who I thought I was. Maybe that is who I am. I mean: I wasn't usually the kind of person who thought 'Your problems are your problems, don't leave them here on my turf' (except for one fairly shitty episode or maybe two with one or two dysfunctional relationships, that turned toxic).

But maybe now I'm more honest about saying things like 'I'm honestly coping with a lot right now, I don't think I can deal with... xyz'.

Now to actually say it aloud. And move on to the next thing. (Hold the self-absorption.)

Meanwhile, please do check out our fabulous work over on The Health Collective. You won't regret it. And no I didn't write this (below)...One of our brave contributors did!

Sometimes you have to look for the silver lining even when things are tough. And while I totally admit a positivity bias while sharing on social and online (something a lot of us have in common!), I genuinely try, these days, to find something...to choose Hope over Despair; Pockets of laughter even in Grief and so on and so forth.

I tried to put some of these thoughts into a non-lecture-pot piece over on UC News. Do give it a read, if you like! Feedback welcome!

What's Inspiring You Today?

We spend so much time focusing on the things that are going wrong -- and there's certainly enough material for most of us to keep us going till kingdome come... but what about the things that go right?

Almost every time you look for it -- even in the midst of adversity -- there's something positive, someone trying to make an efffort to help you, say, or something that you never noticed before that helps you deal with your trouble. (And no I don't mean alcohol or any of the usual crutches!)

Sometimes you meet people who inspire you ... if you're lucky! Sometimes it's a beautiful piece of art or literature...

Over on my passion project that is The Health Collective, this past week we've featured a wonderful in-depth review with family therapist Reena Nath. Go ahead and read it here!

This week, we have the gentle but pressing advice from therapist Ratna Golaknath in her series Lost Voices, on taking your own time to grieve and heal... on your own schedule, after losing a pregnancy.

Both experts talk about the importance of being kind to yourself, so that for me is a KEY take-away.